38 BCBusiness maY 2015
balization is an industry that few could have
imagined existing back in the 1980s. Last Sep-
tember, more than 17,000 children from around
the world began their school terms here (paying
almost $15,000 each in tuition), and over the
course of the year some 50,000 adults arrived
to study English. Were B.C. a country we'd rank
fifth—behind the U.S., the U.K, Canada and Aus-
tralia—as a study destination for those sectors.
Throw in university students—which, admit-
tedly, everyone gets—and international educa-
tion is worth some $3 billion annually.
It's obligatory as well to bring up the tech
sector, even though ours has long been a bit of a
mess. In terms of growth we haven't even kept
up to the Canadian norm—which itself lags the
rest of the world's—because, as they say in youth
court, we made some bad choices. Had hydro-
gen power or console gaming worked out a little
better, boy would we be sitting pretty, but as his-
tory shows, they didn't. That said, we do seem to
have found a groove in the past couple of years,
with the arrival on our shores of tech behemoths
like
IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, SAP and
Sony. Perhaps even more important is the rapid
growth of homegrown start-ups, with names like
Hootsuite, BuildDirect and Global Relay, each
of which has employees by the hundreds and
annual revenues measured in, or rapidly head-
ing for, the hundreds of millions. We absolutely
recognize that your tech sector is just as big as
ours, but yours is heavily geared to the petro-
leum industry—whereas ours is highly diverse,
with a growing emphasis on social media and
Let us be the
first to admit,
our economy
has hit no home
runs, or even a
stand-up triple.
Instead, we have
strung together
so many singles
and doubles (along
with the odd walk
and a hit batter
or two) that we're
winning our share
of games
Paul josePh (left); IstoCk (mIddle); brIan hoWell (rIght)
